Though sports games tend not to have narrative arcs, you can still finish them. The end comes when you're pretty much unbeatable, and so there's no challenge remaining.

You'll be finished Ice Age 4: Continental Drift - Arctic Games no more than an hour after you've started, and you'll have no reason to go back to it. While it lasts it's decent, but it doesn't last nearly long enough.

Little Ice Age

You play as either The Herd or the Pirate Crew in a series of mini-game-like sporting events. Poorly voiced by their original actors, Manny, Sid, Scrat, Peaches and the rest spout a very limited number of lines as they compete for the grand prize.

They're rendered well enough, and the accompanying - and I'm assuming totally original - cut-scenes are high quality. They're not accompanied by the soundtrack, though, sucking a lot of the franchise's atmosphere from these short video sequences.

As the games commence there's the unshakable taint of cash-in about the product. For one thing, there are just ten different events to play through, and little variation to proceedings when you play them repeatedly.

One event sees you slipping down a mountainside and smashing into icy outcrops for extra speed. There's just the one course to be found, and large sections of it are also used for the slalom event that's also included on the cartridge.

You can go for a couple of ends of curling, but the AI never puts up much of a fight, the only challenge being whether you can repeatedly get your stones close to the centre of a spherical target.

An obstacle course game shows promise as you dash across collapsing icebergs and get thrust into the air by steam outlets. Again, though, it's too simple and the hazards repeat too often.

Slush

The face buttons and touchscreen controls are responsive and work well, but there's none of the finesse you might see in better examples of the genre.

When you get to events that require precision - such as a slingshot-firing contest in which you aim for distant targets - you'll always get a hit as long as you aim in roughly the right direction.

As you'll have gathered by now, the game is easy and repetitive, and you'll have achieved all of the highest medals for all the events within an hour. With no great set of unlockables, and an underdeveloped multiplayer mode, there's no reason to return.

If Ice Age 4: Continental Drift - Arctic Games required a bit more from you, or contained more events, or had any other hook to draw you back in it would be an entertaining enough sports-'em-up. Without them, it's just another movie tie-in.